TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge • Hacker News Board

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#221

Post by BeetleB » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 10:06 PM UTC

georgeburdell wrote: post #121

Selfishly... so will all this CapEx by TSMC, Samsung, and Intel put pressure on wages? I’m in the industry at a large company getting 3% raises, 10% of comp as stock, and a salary about 1/3 less than a software dev. All while being highly reviewed. I write a lot of software for my job (although it’s not my title) and I’ve been thinking of trying for pure software jobs even if the work is more boring (I do semiconduct…

> I write a lot of software for my job (although it’s not my title) and I’ve been thinking of trying for pure software jobs even if the work is more boring (I do semiconductor R&D)

This sounds like me in a past life. I assure you: It's worth the change. (Often) Easier work. Paid more. Treated better. Nicer work environment. It's worth it even if the pay were the same.

Also, with SW roles in your resume, you can then find jobs outside the semiconductor industry. Lots more options available to you.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#222

Post by bsder » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

rcxdude wrote: post #37

bsder wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> True, but where do you see demand dropping off? Likely December. Right now, because everyone is fearful of shortages, they've overbought or are in the process of overbuying. At some point, everyone is going to realize that, in the US, carrying inventory has tax implications, and everybody is going to try to dump a bunch of inventory back into the system that they really didn't need and aren't prepared to pay taxes…

Who's keeping inventory? Certainly for consumer channels there's basically no inventory to be had.

End companies, themselves. Any inventory that shows up gets overbought immediately. Two companies I know have x10 the microcontrollers they need for the year because they overbought when they could.

If they pushed those microcontrollers back right now, they'd make quite a nice profit. But they won't.

Instead, those companies will hit the tax implications starting in December and then will try to push their overbought inventory. Of course, at that point everybody will be trying to push their inventory and the prices will crash.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#223

Post by FpUser » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #193

FpUser wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Personally? Sitting about 40km from a priority US target, I'd support the US risking a strike to guarantee Taiwan's freedom." Personally I'd support the US never letting people with this kind of thinking anywhere near decision making. Let them play stocks.

All insistence in international politics has risk. If you can't tolerate risk, you'll get pushed around by those who are willing to.

Respond with overwhelming force if being pushed. If however you are the one starting pushing you are just a bully or in this particular case fuckin' war criminal.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#224

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 10:25 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #199

barkingcat wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to remember is that the current CEO Tim Cook started in the supply chain management side of the company... And did that job for Steve Jobs during the growth of the iphone. It would be expected that Apple would have extended insight into supply chain and capacity, seeing as the head of the company was/is the one who did that job.

It's also a strength on the demand prediction side which is typically done by marketing not the manufacturing side of the business. Yes, I know Cook came from Compaq for his supply chain chops, but there are amazing supply chain folks elsewhere in the industry. On this dimension Apple is in a class by itself. Perhaps that fixation does come from Cook, as supply chain wizards typically don't rise that high in the corp…

[deleted]

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#225

Post by to11mtm » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 10:36 PM UTC

tehjoker wrote: post #134

ethbr0 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with all things, an optimization (e.g. agile, JIT/lean manufacturing) is predicated on certain assumptions. In this instance, "we exist in an ecosystem where our suppliers can rapidly respond to volatile demand from us." If the assumptions fail, then it's not a failure of the optimization, but an incorrect application of it. Maybe we don't currently live in a world in which elastic semiconductor availability at sc…

Nearly all industries have moved to Just-In-Time to reduce costs, at the cost of making the entire economy more fragile. We saw this highlighted in the pandemic as suddenly there were no reserves of hospital capacity due to JIT optimization.

Heck even consumer goods like toilet paper were impacted.

JIT is useful when the end-product has a high depreciation rate and/or you forsee yourself frequently changing the part out for a newer version.

Another tendril on the issue; modern accounting practices tend to prefer JIT instead of the costs/overhead mechanics of storing inventory.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#226

Post by variaga » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #202

variaga wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're basically right. Nobody doing actual chip design cares about process nm numbers. Process selection done right is a fairly tedious comparison of dynamic power consumption, static power consumption, achievable operating frequencies, wafer cost, SRAM density, IP availability, process maturity/yeild, fab capacity/ availability and about a dozen other factors. There will be a large-ish excel spreadsheet somewhere t…

It's basically a version number.

Yes, that's a good analogy, although the nm number by itself isn't the full version e.g for 28nm alone, TSMC had 28HP, 28HPL, 28HPM, 28HPC and 28HPC+ variants, of which only HPM and HPC (but not HPC+!) are at all compatible.

28HPC+ and 28HP have very different performance, even if they're both "28nm".

And if you really want to specify a process you also need to know the metal stack (lots of options there), Vt selection(s) (most processes have 2-5 options) & high-voltage device support option.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#227

Post by monocasa » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 10:49 PM UTC

qball wrote: post #217

monocasa wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xboxes and PlayStations have cryptographic chains of trust going back to their on die boot ROM. You can't just pull it out and use it on another Xbox or PlayStation, much less use them for generic computation. I think the Xbox One is the first console to have no unsigned code execution at all during it's lifetime.

You can trivially run whatever code you wanted to if you seized the signing keys; I suspect that in such a "collect all the general-purpose computers for general-purpose computing things" that would be the first order of business. Not that the government doesn't already have copies, of course.

I guess I didn't read a .gov mandate in what the parent was suggesting.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#228

Post by georgeecollins » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 11:21 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #196

lenkite wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first studied about JIT in college, I asked my professor: Doesn't this manufacturing methodology lack fault-tolerance and isn't it deeply susceptible to natural calamities or economic failures ? He replied that it was proven, adaptable and reliable. Other suppliers would come in if some suppliers failed. JIT (aka lean manufacturing) today has now permeated pretty much most of the global supply chain. Human civ…

The true argument should have been that it's more efficient (for everyone involved). Which would have invited the honest debate between the relative merits of resilience vs efficiency.

That reminds me of Taleb's idea of comparing certain investment strategies to "picking up pennies in front of a steam roller" (or insuring mortgage backed securities). It's easy money until it isn't. But when it isn't, it is really bad.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#229

Post by blagie » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 11:31 PM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #153

ip26 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Older levels of performance wouldn't cripple humanity. But putting together something that actually works out of a big parts bin is a crapshoot, and supporting a deployment of machines which are each completely unique is an IT nightmare. We could do it if we had to, of course.

I think the best chances to get something useful would be to collect x86 consoles. x86 means you've got a well supported target, and consoles means you've got limited hardware variations. Military could probably pressure Microsoft to give them some way to turn an original xbox into a PC; and if you give people $50 for an original xbox most will be happy.

There are a number of commonly-used microcontrollers. Z80 comes to mind. So does Atmel. So do a few common ARM variants. If you can cover those, you're not in bad shape.

Re: TSMC cancels chip price cuts and promises $100B investment surge

#230

Post by blagie » Thu, Apr 01, 2021, 11:33 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #105

ekianjo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Youtube isn't sticking around As an end user it would be manageable but dont forget that the whole world runs on servers and many Industries would collapse if computing power is gone

Computational power If we lost a few decades of processor improvements, it would be about as parent noted. If we lost worldwide connectivity or all undersea backbones between some terrestrial networks... it would be civilization-altering.

I feel like BBSes did okay for most purposes over 300 baud modems. I mean, I'm not getting a picture of what I'm buying on Amazon, unless I want to wait 5 minutes for it to download, but I can still make the purchase.

On the server side, you'll be running C code rather than a nice high-level language, but it will get the job done. You might not have all the ML which lets me get the most relevant product recommended, but....

Emails definitely won't be HTML, but they'll come through.

The world would work.